


Tales of Brave Ulysses

by simplyprologue



Series: Careful the Tale You Tell (Children Will Listen) [2]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Charlotte-fic, Childbirth, F/M, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 18:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4111054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac isn’t dying this time, but he’s still holding her hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tales of Brave Ulysses

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This was supposed to be a short little thing, and then I conceded to it being two thousand words, and then three, and then four, and then it wound up being five thousand words when I was finally done and satisfied with it. The title and lyrics are taken from the song, "Tales of Brave Ulysses," by Cream. Many thanks to Pippa for encouraging me to finish this. Forever mourning that Sorkin didn't do more with Mac and Jim's friendship and pre-series backstory beyond the flashbacks we got in the finale.

_You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever_  
_But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun_  
_And the colors of the sea bind your eyes with trembling mermaids_  
_And you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave Ulysses_

 

* * *

 

She’s not dying this time — she wasn’t dying last time either, or perhaps _didn’t die_ is the correct semantic distinction, but he held her hand from Islamabad to Landstuhl, trying to squeeze life back into her limp grey fingers as the medic pushed epinephrine, pushed atropine, pushed amiodarone, into her IV line as her heart rate skittered sideways and stopped once, and then again.

Mac isn’t dying this time, but he’s still holding her hand.

Mac has endured being stabbed in the abdomen, and the recovery from that, and the searing pain of separation that she bore for twenty-six months before that, so she’s also turning down an epidural every time the nurse asks her if she wants one. And Jim knows better than to suggest to Mac that maybe she concede to pain management options, definitely knows better than to suggest anything but his absolute agreement and support to Mac now that she’s in hour seven of labor.

“Where are they?”

Jim pulls his cellphone out of his pocket, unlocking it to see a new text from Elliot. Which is vaguely concerning, if it means that Will has taken over driving. “Exit 132 on the Parkway. So probably another hour, if the roads are clear.”

Probably less than that, if Will is the one behind the wheel.

But the snow is coming down in thick white curtains now, has been since late afternoon. It’s why Will couldn’t get a flight out of DC, why he and Elliot decided to rent a car instead. _Only Mac and Will,_ he thinks. _Nothing can ever be straightforward and simple with them._

Mac forces her husband and her ten o’clock anchor out of state to handle the chaos left behind by Jane Barrow with her departure. She’s only thirty-seven weeks along (although Jim remembers reading something about thirty-seven weeks being full term… or close enough) and the trip is only overnight, but of course she goes into labor. And of course the “passing snow showers” that were supposed to be working their way out to sea turn into something that passably resemble blizzard conditions.

Exhaling through pursed lips, Mac braces herself against the uncomfortable mattress of her bed in Mount Sinai’s labor and delivery ward.

“I want to get up again.”

The request for help is tacit, hidden in her eyes, swollen and heavily-lidded and downcast. Mac doesn’t bother asking him for things anymore, hasn’t for years. He just expects what she needs him to do, and does it. Because she’s Mac and he’s Jim and the rest of it isn’t worth a fucking thing; seven years ago he told her that he would follow her anywhere.

And that was that.

Careful, he bears her weight and helps her stand.

 

* * *

 

Four years ago he carried her out of a riot, unsure if she was breathing or if her heart was even beating. She had been sprawled out on the concrete, and his vision was burning into white from the tear gas the MPs hurled into the crowd and he ran and ran and ran, his arms burning, until he found the face of a marine that they knew.

Jim is nowhere near as tall as Will, is only a few inches taller than Mac when she’s not in heels, but it’s working for them right now. Both her arms are curled around his neck, her face pressed into the hollow of his shoulder, and he has both his hands on her hips. Her back is arched and her knees slightly bent, legs spread a shoulder’s width apart, her swollen stomach in the space between their two bodies. She shivers and shakes, and he slides his hands up and down her sides, his fingers working into the tense muscles of her back.

(He really has no fucking clue what he’s doing — he knows Mac and Will took classes, he knows said classes exist, but beyond a few YouTube videos he watched during a brief period when Leona Lansing kicked him out of the room to give Mac a pep talk Jim is entirely unprepared for this — but like with everything that has come before in their professional and personal relationship, Mac has no qualms with telling him what he has to do.

Mrs. Lansing probably would have been better at this, but he’s the one Mac asked for.

So here he is.)

“I really should have considered our terrifically shitty luck,” Mac says, voice trembling from either emotion or exertion. Jim isn’t certain. “He probably did. He didn’t want to go to DC, but I pulled the boss card and made him do it.”

He withholds a sigh, filtering it out slowly through his nose. “I’m pretty sure the reason Will didn’t want to go to DC is because he’s a paranoid neurotic whose anxiety operates at the speed of light.”

After all, there _is_ some credibility to the statement that Will has hardly been more than two feet away from Mac at any given moment the past seven months (and failing that, making Jim miserable for the sin of not being Mac) but Jim doesn’t think that pointing that out would make her feel any better.

Regardless, he’s pretty certain that she’s not even paying attention to him at the moment.

A quick look down at her face — strained and red, eyes shut tight — confirms this.

“I mean, we get engaged and a multimillion dollar lawsuit is filed nine hours later. We get married and he goes to jail. I get pregnant and our best friend dies. I go into labor and he’s stuck in a — a fucking blizzard.” Mac’s breathing hitches, her words curtailing into a low moan as another contraction seizes her.

She sways to the right; he stiffens his arms and braces his legs to keep her standing and vertical, looking to the clock.

“I understand that you want to blame this on the universe, and that’s a logical line of thought, really, but have you considered the possibility that yours and Will’s genetics have simply produced the most contrary child known to man?” he asks, rubbing her back, watching as the minute hand on the clock hanging over the door ticks back to where it and the contraction started.

At last, her frame loosens and relaxes, and she sags against him and tries to catch her breath; they both know she only has a few minutes before the next one.

“Oh god, I’m grounding her right now,” she says with a shaky laugh that trails off into a frustrated groan.

“I wonder how you would ground a newborn,” he muses.

He lifts a hand to the nape of her neck, digging his fingertips into knotted roped muscle.  

“Don’t ask me to be rational right now,” she says, jabbing him in the throat with a single manicured finger.

He elects to ignore her. “Did anyone buy you any really ugly onesies?”

This might not be the wisest direction to take the conversation, but Jim remembers long dark nights huddled together in tin can barracks as mortar fire battered down on the roof, cloud-covered days hiding behind Humvees as bullets whizzed over their heads. He remembers nonsense conversations and inappropriate humor.

There might be some validity to the comparison between living in war zones to getting through childbirth… but Jim is mostly just hoping that he’s not saying the _wrong_ thing even if he doesn’t know what the _right_ thing is.

Mac snorts and sways again, into him this time. Wrapping his arm more securely around her waist — or a distinct lack thereof — he bolsters his hold on her.

“Will.”

He laughs too. “Make her wear those ones. Hit her where it hurts, the baby pictures.”

That wins him a slightly delirious giggle, and he wonders if it’s funny because she’s in pain or funny because they both know what’s packed in the bags waiting in the private maternity suite she and Will have had booked for months — before they left for the hospital Mac had shoved a list into his hands, asking him to go through her things again, convinced she’d forgotten something and since he’d already seen her underwear before who gave a fuck. It was calming, even if he wasn’t checking off camera equipment and satellites and microphones and the bags were Louis Vuitton instead of off brand and tattered.  

Feeling at last like something less than helpless, Jim slides his hand up from her neck to smooth her sweat-damp hair back into place in her ponytail.

 

* * *

 

Seven contractions later, his phone vibrates inside the back pocket of his jeans. Mac’s phone has been relegated to music player since he got her checked into L&D and situated in the room, and Jim guesses someone took Will’s phone away from him because all of the calls have been coming from Elliot the past few hours.

Gently letting one hand go of Mac, he fishes his phone out of his pants.

“Hey, Elliot.”

“We’re almost to the Lincoln Tunnel. So another twenty or thirty minutes. How’s Mac?”

Moaning quietly her body goes rigid again. Jim sandwiches his phone between his ear and his shoulder, replacing his hand on her hip.

“You’re not taking the Holland?” he asks, in lieu of answering.

“Maggie says the Lincoln will be quicker. She’s planning on just cutting across and then up Fifth, says it’ll be quicker than trying to get through the village to FDR Drive. Considering she was planning her usurpation of the driver’s seat for most of Maryland and Delaware, I trust she has this figured out.”

Relieved, but unwilling to show it, Jim asks, “Maggie is with you?”

“Oh. I didn’t tell you that, did I?” Elliot sounds humored, potentially more than he should be right now. Jim scrunches his eyebrows together, and tries to focus more on Mac than he is on the phone call.

“No you did not.” He sighs. “Where’s Will?”

“In the back. He kept grabbing the wheel, and I thought Maggie was going to punch him in the face so I made him sit in the back.” That, Jim has no problems believing, all things Margaret Jordan-related considered. Elliot huffs a laugh. “And now he’s trying to grab my phone. Will, take this from someone who has done this three times—”

There’s a brief scuffle, and Maggie shouts something over the din.

“How’s MacKenzie?” Will asks half a second later.

“Six centimeters dilated at last count, continuing to handle this better than both of us.” Craning his head to look down at Mac, he smiles when he sees a much smaller one tug at the corners of her mouth. “Do you want to talk to—?”

Will doesn’t let him finish. “Yes.”

“I was asking her,” Jim patiently explains, continuing to gauge the expression on Mac’s face as she progresses through the contraction. “Just a minute.”

“Why?” he asks, voice ratcheting into a tone of pure terror. “What’s—”

“She’s having a contraction, she can’t talk right now,” he mumbles, feeling inexplicably defensive even though he knows this is Will, this is MacKenzie’s husband.

But maybe it’s something older and more ingrained than that, a flare of the well-honed instinct that insisted that he make the marines call her ma’am, treat her as she deserved, regard her without derision and contempt. That the “lady” was busy doing her job, go do yours, leave her the fuck alone. Her name is Mac, Ms. McHale, or ma’am, and she is a CNN war correspondent with more hours logged in combat zones than a skinny private with acne on his forehead.

“Oh.”

He can hear Will basically vibrating out his skin. It triggers a brief pang of sympathy, but Jim thinks both he and Will would agree that Mac and her feelings are the most important thing right now.

Mac shudders, rolling her head to look up at him, and then nods.

“Here you go,” he murmurs gently, and holds the phone to her ear for her.

He can’t really hear what Will’s saying, but it’s nothing that requires more than one-word answers from Mac. For the first time since her water broke and it became apparent that yes, this was really happening and no, Will wasn’t here and there was _definitely_ no slowing it down, Mac’s eyes brim with tears. But she’s so much more tired than she was when her water broke all those long hours ago, and they spill over this time.

“Will,” she croaks out, her fingers turning into Jim’s shirt where it’s stretched over his back. And then she says his name again, a fresh wave of sweat dotting her forehead. “I need you.”

And that too is familiar.

 _She’s not dying this time,_ Jim has to remind himself.

Heaving uneven breaths, she refuses to cry in earnest. Her eyes flutter closed, tears tracking down her reddened cheeks. Jim can’t hear Will’s reassurances, but they go on and on until Mac nods and tells him that she’ll be fine, she loves him, she’ll see him soon. When he pulls the phone away from her ear he sees that the call has already been disconnected, so he locks the screen and pockets it again.

With a ragged whine Mac buries her face against him.

“Feel free to use my shirt to, you know,” he offers, smoothing circles over the flower-printed hospital gown covering her back. “As a tissue.”

“I was going to anyway,” she grumbles, sniffling. “Maggie’s driving?”

“Yeah, she took over since she’s the one whose wife isn’t having a baby and has actual experience driving in the snow,” he says, going for comforting and probably failing, deciding to go for blunt and potentially funny instead. “And it sounds like Elliot is keeping Will distracted by taunting him.”

“An easier prospect if Sloan was there,” she jokes, and then winces. “I need to move.”

He allows her to push him into position next to the hospital bed, and helps her keep her balance is she leans to brace her forearms on the mattress. Scrunching up her face, Mac rolls her neck, tendons popping and releasing until she finally sighs, shoulders going limp, her forehead drooping until it touches the stark white sheets.

“I think Maggie’s pitching in her share of the work,” he says with a shrug, looking down at her dingy socks paired against the clean blue linoleum floor.

“Good. Yeah, she’s a good multitasker.”

Mac moans again, her shoulders hitching forward. Frowning, Jim looks at the monitor, and sees that she’s not having a contraction.

“Alright, just breathe. Will is gonna be here soon, and you can kick his ass in person.” He stands behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. Groaning, she swats his hands lower, nodding when he digs his thumbs into the small of her back. Nodding, he sweeps his gaze over the medical instruments that have been steadily accumulating in the back of the room with every visit of a nurse. “Use all your favorite curse words, chuck one of those metal things at his head.”

She makes a sound that could best be described as a whistling sigh.

“Oh… this is my fault.”

He assumes she’s talking about Will’s absence. There are logical arguments to be made, that first babies usually come a week late (Jim read that one during a quick scan of BabyCenter while on a bathroom break a few hours ago) and she’s thirty-seven weeks along (which, despite the fact that he was ignorant enough to not put together that Mac’s ex-boyfriend’s name was William and that her ex-boyfriend was Will McAvoy until the relationship was quite literally staring him in the face, he knows because the whole newsroom has been talking about due dates and week-by-week progressions since the summer) and she was only forcing Will an hour away by plane and despite what she would like to think about her abilities, she cannot and has never been able to control to the weather. Not when they were wrapped around each other for warmth during a cold rain in a leaky cave in Waziristan, and not now.

“I thought we agreed you’re grounding the kid?”

“No, she’s too little to do that,” she says, voice wavering.

“Okay.”

He reaches for the tissue box on the side table, and hands one to her.

“I’ll just make our meteorologists’ lives hell for the next few… I don’t know, years.” Mac lifts her head enough to wipe her eyes and blow her nose.

“Sounds fair,” Jim says, nodding, his lips tweaking into a nervous frown. (But, really. If the president of your news company asks you for a forecast for the weekend, and she’s weeks away from giving birth, you should be pretty damn sure about that forecast.)

The monitor _does_ leap to life then, and MacKenzie sags against the bed, knees bending until she’s almost in a squat.

“Fuck,” she grits out. “Fuckfuckfuck.”

 

* * *

 

The door is pulled shut by Mac’s obstetrician, and Mac herself shifts uncomfortably on the hospital bed, lifting her legs down from the stirrups. Seven or eight centimeters dilated, the doctor said as Mac’s face contorted into an expression of visible discomfort.

_Seven or eight centimeters._

Soon.

According to WebMD, Mayo Clinic and, well, the OB, Mac will be hitting transitional labor soon and past the point of no return for an epidural and if she starts to regret that decision she is definitely going to need Will, not him, just like how she needed Will when she was bleeding out in the back of the military transport to the airfield outside of Islamabad.

Maggie is probably still fighting her way uptown in the ice and snow.

Rapping his knuckles softly on the windowsill, he turns away from the scene of snow accumulating in Mount Sinai Medical Center’s courtyard and back towards Mac.

“I’m sorry.” With a dry laugh, she frames the round of her belly with her hands. “You never signed up for this.”

“Yeah, I signed up for twelve months in Baghdad as a CNN production assistant. Look at me now.” Jim smiles at her, shoving his hands in his pockets.

He wonders if Will is going to properly understand this, properly appreciate it — Will was not there when they were sent flying over the Mediterranean Sea in a helicopter, Will did not listen to Mac’s heart stop twice on the monitor, Will did not listen to her cries as she was told to pack and was sent flying across the Atlantic to another coast, Will was not there when Mac clawed her way, raw and scarred and terrified, back to Manhattan, and Will is not here now.

But he will be, because he’s Will, and he never does things by halves.

Even when Jim was barely restraining himself from punching Will, and not bothering to restrain himself from glaring at him, he understood that much.

“That’s not what I meant,” Mac grouses, pretending to examine the IV that one of the nurses started in her arm during her last exam. Blinking rapidly, her eyes sliding out of focus even if they don’t shift from the access port taped to her forearm.

“I know,” he says, scrambling for something encouraging to say. “He’ll be here any minute. They’re close enough that if traffic isn’t moving quickly enough for Will he’ll get out and run.”

The small grin she gives him is conciliatory, but nothing else, and with an absent look on her face she draws her hands across her stomach. All Jim knows is that the baby is in the correct position — that’s what the doctor said — and that he doesn’t know what else Mac is searching for.

Well.

Will, of course.

“I really never thought it’d be like this.”

Drawing his bottom lip between his teeth, he slowly sits down on the edge of the mattress and takes one of Mac’s hands in his own. “You _have_ admitted to not considering your history of bad luck.”

For a long moment, she doesn’t respond, her free hand still cupping over the curve of her belly.

“No… after the stabbing, the doctors said that I couldn’t… get pregnant.”

He doesn’t understand. Will has been ecstatic when he hasn’t been panicking, and Mac has been smiling nonstop when Pruitt and Jane Barrow haven’t been making her assume the facial expression of someone about to commit homicide.

“The baby wasn’t planned?”

“We wanted a baby,” Mac says fiercely, piercing him with a sharp look. “I’ve wanted Will’s baby, for… well.” She gives him a small shrug and a helpless look. “And then I was stabbed and then I thought it couldn’t happen. And Will hated me so it wasn’t going to happen anyway. And then… we just thought — our ages, my scar tissue, all the stress we’re under. And then it just _happened_.”

(Not that Jim understands what she means by that, either, but he knows that he doesn’t understand a lot of things, especially about pregnancy and childbirth. He just knows that Mac has to be scared right now, and that things are happening to her like the stabbing happened to her.

But she’s going to have a healthy baby girl put into her arms, and it’s not going to be like when he first crept into her private room in the ICU at Landstuhl. She’s going to be exhausted but exhilarated, not strung out on morphine with her emotions twisted every which way as he tries to convince her to just stay lying down before she rips out her stitches.)

Mac is having a _baby._ It’s happening. Right now. An actual good thing.

He squeezes Mac’s fingers between his own.

“See? You have some good luck left.”

“Yeah.” Tears once again beading at the corners of her eyes, she nods, trying to convince herself of what he’s just said. “You’re right.”

Mac’s been right all along, about all of it — and whether she admits it or not, four years ago she walked into a Shiite riot so that he didn’t have to. So that if anyone on their team got hurt for the story, it would be her.

She deserves this.

 

* * *

 

In the middle of her next contraction, the door bangs open. Snow still melting on his jacket, Will stands breathlessly in the doorway for a moment, and then strides forward, crossing the room to Mac in three long steps.

And that’s it.

Mac sees Will and Will sees Mac and then they see nothing else but each other. Letting his jacket drop to the floor Will sits on the bed, easing down next to her. Jim stands, letting Will take over, wrap Mac’s hand around his, press kisses to her face, push her bangs back from her forehead.

“I’m sorry,” Will murmurs, his mouth landing on Mac’s temple, her nose, her cheeks — and she reaches for him too, sliding her hand into the hair at the back of his neck. “I’m here, I’m sorry. I’m here now.”

With that, Jim wonders if his exit should be a silent one and starts drifting towards the door.

But Mac’s eyes track onto him, her hand reaching out to him, beckoning him back. Awkward now, he returns to her bedside, and allows her to pull him down for a kiss of his own, brushed against the corner of his mouth.

“Thanks, Jim,” she says, giving his hand one last squeeze.

Uncertain of how to answer, he tangles their fingers together, and then lets go. “Good luck,” he winds up saying, and mentally berating himself for it immediately afterwards. But Mac gives him a crinkle-eyed smile, before pointing to the door. “I mean it,” Jim says sternly, trying for better parting words. He thinks he winds up channeling Charlie, and gesturing vaguely towards Will, he reminds her, “Break his hand!”

He closes the door on Will’s scandalized expression, and stops, all of a sudden finding it hard to breathe. Swallowing hard, he straightens his back and begins to head towards the waiting area that he and Mac passed through what feels like an age ago, knowing that he’ll find at least Maggie and Elliot.

 

* * *

 

Jim winds up finding a lot more than Maggie and Elliot. Which, admittedly, he should have expected.

His appearance in the waiting room is met with a raucous cheer and he gives up on counting just how many people have showed up for Mac after tallying the senior staff, Don, Sloan, the Lansings, and some of the control room guys — and just walks into Maggie’s arms, hiding a kiss on her neck, sagging tiredly against her.

“You need a drink,” Elliot calls from his seat next to Don and Sloan.

“He needs a drink?” Maggie retorts, trying to brush the wrinkles out of his shirt, a truly hopeless endeavor at this point. “I’m the one who got us through New Jersey in two and a half hours. I need a drink.”

“I need a _nap,_ ” Jim feels himself whine, and lets her drag him down into a row of upholstered seats. Regardless of his protests, someone presses a flask into his hand anyway. If he looked up, he suspects he’d see it was from Mrs. Lansing. “Thanks,” he mutters, and takes a long pull of what turns out to be bourbon before handing it to Maggie. “So how was the ride with Will?”

“They’re lucky to be alive,” Jenna answers.

“Elliot had to tackle him in the rental car lot to keep him from trying to break the sound barrier leaving the Beltway,” Maggie explains, pulling his head down to rest on her shoulder.

Jim snorts. “Oh. Good.”

“I didn’t… tackle him... “ Elliot’s voice is uncertain, and a little defense, and Jim laughs again, feeling a strong and slow sensation start to grip his limbs. Sleep, probably. It has to be close to one in the morning, and he’s been with Mac since she called him rambling about what she thought were Braxton Hicks a little after five o’clock. “I didn’t tackle him _per se._ I was just trying to do a little coaching, father to father.”

“How far along is she now?” Tess asks.

Jim opens his eyes, feeling them drag shut almost immediately. He tries to fight it off, lifting his head off of Maggie’s shoulder. “Eight centimeters, contractions every three minutes lasting a minute. At least another hour or two. Maybe less. I don’t know.”

Threading her fingers in his hair, Maggie pulls his head back down to her.

He stops fighting after that.

 

* * *

 

The next thing Jim knows, he’s being shaken awake. A quick glance at the clock hanging above the nurse’s station shows that it’s almost four o’clock, and instead of fewer people in the waiting room, there are more. One of whom he knows to be one of Mac’s sisters, and the others are tall blondes he assumes to be McAvoys. The last is Nancy Skinner.

“What’s up?” he asks, voice a sleepy blur of consonants.

Maggie shoves her cell phone under his nose. “She was born. Forty minutes ago. They’re just waiting on clearance from the doctor and then they’re moving Mac and the baby to the maternity ward.”

When he finally blinks his eyes to the point where they agree to focus, he reads a text message from Will on Maggie’s phone that says just that. “Mac and baby healthy,” he reads, cupping Maggie’s cell phone in his hands. “Seven pounds, four ounces. Isn’t that big, for thirty-seven weeks?”

“Yeah,” she laughs. “Will’s sisters are trying to stake the McAvoy genes on that one.”

“I’m really more focused on the healthy part more than anything else.”

He hands her back her phone.

Her smile yielding to something softer, Maggie nods her head.

 

* * *

 

When Will at last appears — looking entirely harried and anxious and absolutely elated, his hair an uncombed mess and clothes well-worn — in the waiting room, Jim expects him to take back Mac’s sister, or one of his own. Instead he finds himself being the one accompanying Will to the hospital’s private maternity suites.

“So,” Jim asks when they finally stop at one. “Did she break your hand?”

Laughing good-naturedly, Will opens the door, letting him pass through first. He feels abashedly nervous as he walks down the short hallway to Mac’s actual room, but when he sees her he can’t feel anything at all but the soar of warmth in his chest.

Folded into her arms is the girl they’ve been waiting to meet, and his feet carry him to her.

“Hey.”

Her eyes bloodshot and face swollen but clean, Mac looks up at him with more happiness infused in her expression than he’s ever seen in her before. She’s radiant and wide-eyed and Jim feels something like pride thrum through his body, sitting back down on the bed when she pats the empty width of mattress beside her. And then he looks at the baby.

“Hey,” he manages to whisper back, looking from the squished and pink-faced bundle back to Mac. “You have a daughter.”

(There’s more he wants to say than that — that he watched her almost die, he watched her crawl to the end of her career, he watched her sacrifice everything in an attempt to gain something for the rest of them, to give them truth. To save all of them, but never herself, and still saved herself in the process, and built them this home. That he loves her, and he already loves her daughter as well. But there’ll be a time for that, and it’s not now, with Will here.

Later.)

“I do have a daughter,” Mac murmurs back. For a second, she looks over his shoulder, at Will. Carefully, she folds her lips into a wobbling grin. “And her name is Charlotte Harper.”

All of a sudden, Jim finds himself struggling not to cry.

(Or maybe she just gets it, and he doesn’t have to explain it to her.)

Lifting her hand to the place the pads of her fingers at the arch of his cheekbone, Mac brings him closer for his forehead to meet her own.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.


End file.
